One website says that the technology to film the book has finally caught up with Card's imagination. But, frankly, I don't believe that's true. The one big tricky thing in the book is the arena where the kids are taught to fight mock battles, but even that has surely been doable for some years now. Or am I overlooking something?

Quartet at last made it to the left coast, and it is charming and funny and I loved almost every minute. There's a note of sadness in it, touching on the loss of gifts and the approaching end of life. But it's a minor note; the movie is witty and upbeat and bubbling over with the love of music. Most of the supporting cast playing retired musicians are in fact retired musicians themselves (Dame Gwyneth Jones can still do a killer "Vissi d'arte"). And all the way through the movie we hear strains of familiar music, mostly operatic but not all. Periodically we hear the opening line of the Verdi "Quartet", a sort of teaser for what is to come.

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Only it doesn't come -- not fully, at least. Maggie Smith's character and three others at the retirement home once recorded Rigoletto in a standard-setting performance. Maggie has to be talked into taking part in a concert staged annually on Verdi's birthday; she's just not the singer she once was. But she finally agrees, and when she and the others walk out on the stage, the entire audience rises and applauds like crazy out of sheer joy at seeing these four together again. And that's where the movie ends, on that moment of joy. We hear the quartet sung over the closing credits; we don't see the four stars singing it.

That's the part that left me unsatisfied. The four actors were given training for imitating operatic singing and were filmed doing so, but the scene was cut. Either they were terrible at it or the director thought that moment of joy would make a better ending. (It could have been moved to after the performance.) I really don't know why it was cut.

When Hoffman was asked why he waited until he was 75 to make his debut as a director, he answered..."I don't know."

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I'm of two minds about that ending. I can see why Hoffman ended the movie where he did. The music was there to reunite those four people, so the reunion is the thing, not the music. Still, since the whole movie builds up to their singing together, we should have been able to see that. It couldn't have been an easy decision for Hoffman.

And given that Pauline Collins is the only one in the bunch who can make any claim to actually being able to sing, we would have been hearing dubbed voices...great ones I am sure (if they were credited, I didn't catch them) but not the visible performers. The Rigoletto number was important BECAUSE it linked the four of them...and eventually brought Jean and Reggie back together.

The first trailer for Joss Whedon's film of Much Ado About Nothing has just appeared. This is the movie he shot in and around his Santa Monica estate in less than 2 weeks, in B&W, predominantly with actors he'd worked with before. It has played at a festival or two, got picked up by a distributor late last year, and is scheduled for June release.

Yesterday, I saw François Ozon's In the House. It starts fairly slowly, becomes rather surreal, and then slows down at the end. Well worth a visit (though I'd have preferred to have seen some of the subtitles in British English rather than American English). The major roles are a bored teacher and a creepy youth, and Kristin Scott Thomas is always worth watching.

I've not heard of this one. I've left a request at Fandango to be notified if it shows anywhere in this area, but frankly, I doubt that it will. I've not seen a movie with subtitles in a theater since I moved to California. Pittsburgh, yes, but not here.